Road runner, road runner - going hundred mile per hour!

As a child, I was always slightly annoyed by the roadrunner.

It seemed to me that, in a predator/prey relationship, it was only natural for Wile E. Coyote to want a piece of the bird.

But the bird was always a total asshole.

Rude. 

Or Wile E. Coyote was just incompetent.

Nothing about this idea is even remotely smart. 

Pernod is a bit like the roadrunner for me. It's got a vicious streak, and it makes me regret choices I made in the past. When I was in Prague a few summers ago, I decided to try absinthe - prepared the "right" way.

It did not agree with me. Luckily, my father had his camera on hand, and trapped the moment in amber.

Proof positive that I once had hair. 

It's not the anise flavor that gets to me. If anything, I've adjusted to it marvelously. I appreciate the complexity of the flavor and what it adds to a drink. But this is also its cripple, because Pernod + anything still tastes like Pernod. In that sense, it's a bit like Creme Yvette.

As you'll likely recall, one of the reasons I selected Pernod as our May liqueur was that I frequently saw it pop up as an ingredient in one of the cocktail recipe books I have. It was from this book that I selected the Roadrunner - mostly because, despite not having wine as one of its ingredients, it is served in a wine glass. Fancy!

Photoshopped Road Runner on the left. Actual cocktail not as fun.

Ingredients:
2 oz. gin
1/2 oz. Pernod
1/2 oz. dry vermouth
1 tsp grenadine

While pouring the cocktail into the chilled wine glass, the scent of Pernod assaulted my senses. "Really?" I thought. "This is the most insidious liqueur in the world. It makes Creme Yvette look like an amateur."

But the taste of the cocktail tells a different story. The dry vermouth somewhat evens out the Pernod's bouquet. The distinctive licorice notes are still there, but the headiness of the vermouth elevates the experience a little bit. The gin is totally lost in the mix, and the grenadine is just along for the ride.

Side note: I love grenadine. I think it's primarily used for color, and that's a shame.

Maybe the cocktail is served in a wine glass because it looks an awful lot like wine. But drinker beware: this heady combination warrants only a single glass. When Pernod is invited to a party, it stays for the long haul. I think this recipe halved would be totally acceptable.

Coincidentally, about halfway through writing this post, I accidentally knocked over the cocktail. So my experience was halved, and that was sufficient for me.

I did not make another one.

I am dreading our Pernod Death Match. I have no idea what to do with this ingredient.

Love,
Joe

Nerdy Librarian Citations
MIA. "Bamboo Banga" Kala. CD. Interscope, 2007.

Whitaker, Julie and Ian Whitelaw. A Pocket Guide to Cocktails. Bath: Parragon Books, 2006.

Submarine kiss

Dear Dave,

I poked around looking for a Créme Yvette recipe and couldn't find anything that felt truly compelling. Or anything that I could stomach.

I returned to the Créme Yvette website, which now just seems like a collection of carefully-curated lies by some hipster in Brooklyn who thought bringing back a long-dormant liqueur would score him some Kewl Points™ with the members of some starving artisenal booze collective.

One cocktail on the website continued to intrigue me: the Submarine Kiss.

On our walk earlier today, I kept calling it the Stratosphere. And I was going to draw a humorous parallel to my experience riding the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. Alas, I had the names confused and my Humor Bucket is devoid of anything clever regarding the Submarine Kiss.

Because god is this a dumb name for a cocktail.

I'd deconstruct its meaning if the drink made me feel anything more robust than pure apathy.

What intrigued me about this drink was that it required two preparation steps: the creation of the "silver fizz" and the layering of Créme Yvette.

The layering didn't work, maybe because I don't have a champagne flute. But even if I did, I don't think it would have made that much of a difference. 

Silver Fizz:

• 2 oz. gin (the website recommended Plymouth Gin, but I used London Dry Gin after confirming through a couple half-assed Google searches about the difference between the two)
• 3/4 oz. simple syrup
• 3/4 oz. lemon juice
• one egg white

This combination receives two different shakes in the cocktail shaker: a dry shake (one without ice) and then one with ice. I guess the one with ice is called a wet shake? That sounds so disgusting. 

Once the silver fizz has been prepared, you pour it over one ounce of Créme Yvette. The photo on the website makes it look like the Yvette magically sits on the bottom and the fizz floats on top of it. Maybe the champagne flute allows this to happen, but my result looked markedly different.  

Hide & go Créme Yvette: the Pepto Bismol Years

You know how whenever we made cocktails with Créme de Cassis we couldn't taste it no matter what? The opposite is true with Créme Yvette. 

I was positive it would be lost in the gin. After all, there are two parts gin to the Créme Yvette. 

I put my nose to the cocktail before drinking it, and there it was: the smell of moldy, flowery sadness.

And I took a sip. 

There was a banging at my palate's door.

Créme Yvette didn't wait for me to answer. She barged right on in and drunkenly accused me of not loving her. 

Before I could stammer an explanation, she punched me in the gullet and demanded an explanation. 

I tried to calm her down. 

But Créme Yvette isn't a lady, David. She is a boozy virago, all vitriol and pugnacious fire. 

Gin is no match for her. Lemon is no match for her. Sugar and egg and groveling is no match for her. 

She will find you and she will pummel you into submission. 

And if there is an explanation for this cocktail's lousy name, it is that Créme Yvette kisses like a submarine: a demanding, metallic, bulldozer liplock that tastes of flowery defeat. 

May you have more luck with her.

Love,

Joe

Antibes

Dearest Joe,

So, we picked Bénédictine for this month's liquor. I think, because it had one foot in winter and one foot in spring. We both picked cocktails, though, that bring out its springtime-ish notes.

I'm glad I didn't try to make up some crazy new cocktail using Bénédictine - it may have come out even worse than our experiments with Creme de Cassis. Instead, I went for a tried and true recipe that used things that I already had on hand. It's called the Antibes, and it's delicious.

So, Antibes is a seaside town in France that looks like a lovely place to visit:

Antibes, from tripadvisor.com

And, apparently, we should go. The town looks absolutely gorgeous and there are beaches all over its coast. It also has two fascinating looking museums. There's the Picasso Museum, which is housed in a beautiful restored castle, originally built in the 1700s. Picasso came to visit a painter friend in Antibes and ended up staying for six months painting, sculpting, and making tapestries, many of which he donated to the town when he left. They formed the core collection of the museum.

There's also an Absinthe Museum which, unfortunately, has very little information available online. But it looks like there's a kick-ass bar in the basement:

Image from seeantinbes.com

But until we can book that ticket, we can drink this delicious cocktail named after this lovely place.

It's a mixture of Bénédictine, grapefruit juice, and gin. Simple. That's it! The grapefruit juice - mine was fresh-squeezed, of course - compliments the sweet notes of the Bénédictine and the slightly sour, Christmas tree-like taste of the gin.

You combine 1 1/2 oz, gin, 1/2 oz. Bénédictine, and 2 oz. grapefruit juice in a shaker, shake and strain. If you have an orange you can garnish it.

Then you sip it and imagine you're on a beach in Antibes. Preferably, of course, with me, dear.

Love,

Dave

The Parisian

1/4/16 
6:45 PM

Dear Dave,

Well, here it is: the first cocktail post. 

Tonight I made something called The Parisian. The recipe seemed straightforward enough: equal measures gin, dry vermouth, and crème de cassis. However, the cocktail book in which I found this recipe has a tendency to be a bit off with its measurements. I went to Our Friend the Interwebz and located a tweaked recipe that called for only a quarter ounce of crème de cassis. I decided to use that recipe.

The cocktail has a lovely pink hue, but I'm a bit at a loss for words. It tastes, predictably, like a very dry, vermouth-y martini. The crème de cassis is buried in the mix, and I only get a hint of the black currant flavor after my brain acknowledges the vermouth. And good christ does this have an overwhelming vermouth note. The drink lacks balance and subtlety because the vermouth bangs down the door, hollering, "Y'all like fortified wine*, RIGHT?"

The only reason I'm posting this is because I want to make the cocktail with the book's recipe.

Look forward to an edit - I can't imagine that I'll make another one tonight. This first Parisian? Mai oui, c'est fort!

Joe

*Did you know that vermouth was a type of fortified wine? I didn't. Yay, reading. 

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UPDATE!

I attempted the Parisian again this evening, bringing the crème de cassis quotient up to a full ounce. This gave the drink a truly beautiful, other-worldly hue. It would not look out of place in a science fiction movie. 

 

This revision to the recipe, though, has led me to a bit of an existential crisis with crème de cassis. Dave, I ask you: what is the point of crème de cassis? Did we buy an inferior bottle? Is its role only to imbue your cocktail with color? Are French people this desperate to get drunk?

True: this version of the Parisian is infinitely better than the one I made last night. The vermouth has been subdued by the extra 3/4 ounce of crème de cassis, but I barely taste any of the pronounced black currant flavor we enjoyed a few days ago. Additionally, this Parisian has a slightly thicker quality to it, which only solidifies my initial opinion that crème de cassis is little more than glorified cough syrup.  

Maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe the Parisian is just a bland, unoriginal cocktail that lacks depth of flavor. Maybe it's a cocktail designed for people who don't like cocktails. But, Dave, as you know, I love cocktails. I crave something interesting and unique, a remarkable flavor profile. I do not get this with the Parisian. I get Cosmopolitans for Slightly More Sophisticated Woo-Girls.

I wonder, too, if gin is too subtle a host for crème de cassis. Perhaps what this liqueur needs is a more robust host. Rum or (ugh) tequila or bourbon. Mmmmm... bourbon. 

If we had followers for this blog, this is where I would make a plea to readers to help me understand what this liqueur has to offer. Alas.

I'm looking forward to what your experiment yields. Perhaps you'll have more success. And if it doesn't result in success, perhaps our collective big, beautiful brains will uncover a combination that reveals crème de cassis' true character. 

I remain, though, doubtful.

Intrigued, but doubtful.

Nerdy Librarian Citations
"Parisian" Bar None Drinks. Bar None Drink Recipes, 2013. Web. 4 Jan. 2016. <http://www.barnonedrinks.com>

Walton, Stuart, Suzannah Olivier, & Joanna Farrow. The Bartender's Companion to 750 Cocktails. London: Hermes House, 2009.